Thursday, June 16, 2011

You see, when our armed forces are not firing missiles, they live by an astonishingly liberal ethos — and it works.

...“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,” Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking.

“It’s a really fair system, and a lot of thought has been put into it, and people respond to it really well,” he added. The country can learn from that sense of mission, he said, from that emphasis on long-term strategic thinking.

The military is innately hierarchical, yet it nurtures a camaraderie in part because the military looks after its employees.

Laws in a democracy are an extension of citizens' informal obligations to their neighbors. Democracy is a system of authority, but people owe allegiance to the community, not its leaders. The theory of democracy abstracts from practice: authority ascends before it descends; laws are the result, not the cause. This is something that philosophers, first as theologians and now as liberal or even "radical" technocrats, do not or cannot understand. Kristof and Clark defend authority but not democracy.

In Greece they're rioting against mismanaged paternalism. In Canada, under well-managed paternalism, they're rioting out of boredom.